Psychological study reveals whether women are really into "bad boys"

Can manipulative, narcissistic, or selfish people be considered attractive? Scientists have conducted a study to find out whether these controversial traits have any real appeal when choosing a partner or whether their supposed charm is just a myth.

As the results showed, it all depends on what kind of relationship a woman is looking for. That is, according to Psy Post, women who are attracted to men with "bad boy" traits are looking for short-term partners, while the opposite traits are considered the most attractive for long-term partners.

Until now, there has been little research examining how these negative traits affect partner choice and sexual behavior. Therefore, the authors of the latest study, Yavor Dragostinov and Tom Booth, tried to change this. They developed a set of vignettes, each consisting of a photograph of a face taken from the Chicago Face Dataset, combined with a description of behavior corresponding to low, medium, or high levels of the "Dark Triad" personality traits. In psychology, this term is used to describe a personality that encompasses three traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. They are called "dark" because these traits mostly have a negative impact on others.

The researchers conducted a pilot study with 29 psychology graduate students from the University of Edinburgh to test whether the behaviors described in the vignettes could be recognized as representing the predicted levels of the three dark triad traits. The authors retained only those vignettes for which more than 80% of the participants in the pilot study correctly identified the personality traits presented and used them in further research.

After conducting two more studies with 475 and 794 participants, the authors saw that there was no confirmation of the well-known notion of the attractiveness of the dark triad traits. They found that higher levels of the Dark Triad traits did not increase attractiveness. In other words, lower levels were actually better, especially for long-term relationships.

It should be noted that the study used textual descriptions of behavior and photographs of faces, which were often randomly combined with the descriptions. This is different from real life, where the assessment of attractiveness is based on a complex set of characteristics, including the interaction and consistency of both psychological and physical traits.

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